


mark the grave

by forthekidswhoaintgotnosoul



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Drug Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, idk what its called, klaus-centric, this is an over the years type of thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 05:54:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17861585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthekidswhoaintgotnosoul/pseuds/forthekidswhoaintgotnosoul
Summary: His first drink was a luke-warm beer shoved into his hand by a stranger at the only bar in town that didn’t card. He was fifteen and he knew he would get in trouble for sneaking out the next morning. The thought only fueled him further.In the flashing neon lights the ghosts that followed him around looked just like everyone else and the heavy bass of the club music drowned out their cries.The beer tasted disgusting and so did the stranger’s tongue inside his mouth. Klaus embraced both.Maybe because here, in this shady club, surrounded by girls in leather skirts and with glitter on their cheeks, he finally felt like he belonged. Maybe because the stranger’s firm hand on his hip made him feel comforted in the worst of ways.





	mark the grave

**Author's Note:**

> idk where this came from or what the point is but all the feelings i've had abt klaus since 2015 needed to get out
> 
> title taken from cemetery drive by my chemical romance because of course it is

As a baby, Number Four was easily entertained, but rarely quiet. Something that would never change.  
The nannies would watch the toddler break out into laughter at thin air.  
Little did they know Four saw more than they did, saw people where there were none.  
Often, when they would check on him at night, Four would be wide awake, but not crying, like his siblings might be in the same situation, but happily lying in bed, listening to lullabies only he could hear. (Those were not so much lullabies, but gruesome stories of murders, but Four was little and did not know the difference)

They were four years old, when Number Two called him crazy for talking to no one. 

„But I’m talking to Peter!“, Four argued.  
His brother frowned „Who is Peter?“  
„Peter is my friend!“, Four pointed at the empty space beside him.  
Two looked more and more confused by the second. And so was Four. Was Two making fun of him? Peter was right there! Pretending he couldn’t see him was not a fun game! It was kind of rude, actually.

That night the Monocle called him into his office to talk to him about a boy named Peter, who had been reported missing just a couple weeks ago in a city nearby.  
Four told him that Peter had weird marks on his neck and talked about the big, scary man coming to hurt him at night. He repeated his words days later, when Peter's family visited. It did not occur to Reginald, how cruel it was to have a child be the bearer of such horrid news. 

 

The ghosts came to him.  
Their faces covered in blood, screaming for help, they followed him around.

In his room lived the ghost of a little girl, who died from scarlet fever, and the ghost of an eldery man with a knife stuck in his chest.  
No matter how often Four told them to go away, they would not leave him alone.

He couldn‘t sleep with them staring at him. The little girl cried for her mommy at night. The men was mostly silent, staring out of the window. But the girl’s cries would annoy him and he would spit threats at her, that made Four’s blood freeze in his veins.  
Four curled up below the covers and pressed the pillow on top of his head. He cried himself to sleep every night, and spend all day with headaches.

Not long after Five dissappeared, father announced they would receive names. This task was, of course, below him, so mom got to pick them. She did so with utmost care. Four became Klaus. 

 

The Hargreeves mausoleum was cold and dark and it smelled like death. These ghosts were particularly angry - They tried to grab him, drag him down with them. He could feel their cold hands as they slid through his body.  
Klaus screamed until his throat was raw. He couldn’t breath in here.

„Three more hours“, father said. And then it was dark again.

 

When he was finally allowed to return to the Academy, Klaus didn’t eat for three days, didn’t speak for seven and he still got nightmares two months later. (The ghosts in his room were still there, they had waited for him. He simply turned to lie on his other side)

A few months later he was prescribed sleep medication. He couldn't sleep because of the ghosts and father said it "affected his performance". The medication was given to him by mom, after Pogo noticed Klaus had the habit to take too many pills at once to quiet the voices.

 

His first drink was a luke-warm beer shoved into his hand by a stranger at the only bar in town that didn’t card. He was fifteen and he knew he would get in trouble for sneaking out the next morning. The thought only fueled him further.  
In the flashing neon lights the ghosts that followed him around looked just like everyone else and the heavy bass of the club music drowned out their cries.  
The beer tasted disgusting and so did the stranger’s tongue inside his mouth. Klaus embraced both.  
Maybe because here, in this shady club, surrounded by girls in leather skirts and with glitter on their cheeks, he finally felt like he belonged. Maybe because the stranger’s firm hand on his hip made him feel comforted in the worst of ways.  
„Let’s go to my place“, the man said, his breath smelled like something much more potent the beer.  
Klaus shook his head, eyes widening in panic. Think of what father would say!

Two more guys bought him three more beers that night. When he finally made it home, tripping over his own feet and almost falling out of the window, when climbing in, for the first time in his life the voices didn’t bother him.

Klaus returned to the bar barely three days later. When a tall, blonde guy in his mid-twenties asked him if he wanted to go his place, this time, Klaus nodded. Things got blurry from there.

He started stealing from his father’s liquor cabinet. First sips, then entire bottles.

Alcohol kept the ghosts away. Once Klaus figured that out, it was game over.  
Some other shady aquaintance introduces him to drugs – first weed, then pills. Xanax, MDMA, Ketamine, it’s a wonderful world. And alcohol might quiet them down, but drugs made Klaus feel like he was on top of the world and soon he couldn’t imagine how he ever lived a life without them.

He drank himself to sleep every night, and whoever it was, taking the bottle from his hands after he has passed out (maybe checked if he was still breathing) never mentioned it.

 

Everything went to shit when Ben died. 

The Academy held a memorial service he barely remembered now, and then Klaus locked himself in his room to drink himself into a stupor. He could swear he saw Ben, just before he passed out. (It took almost a month until Ben managed to manifest again. He did not leave Klaus‘ side again after that, even if Klaus often wished he would go away.)

 

His first overdose happened when he was still at the Academy. 

Pogo found him, passed out in his own vomit (or so he was told).  
Klaus got the scolding of a life time from father, then from Pogo, and from Ben for good measure, and a lot of disgusted looks from his other, living, siblings. 

He was The Addict now. The Liabilty. The one no one trusted. A pink little pill took care of the hurt in his chest quite well. 

Not long after, Klaus left. (On their eighteenth birthday, there was only three Hargreeves children left. Vanya was the first to leave on her own terms. Diego left two days after they had turned eighteen)

Klaus found a flat downtown, but didn’t keep it for long, because, surprise, drugs were expensive. The money needed for the amount of pills he popped could put someone through college. And it was not like someone like him could keep a steady job.  
Klaus quickly realized he didn’t really care about anything as long as he could get high. He slept in stranger’s beds and on friend’s (more like aquaintances, he didn’t really have friends. He couldn’t remember his own name some days) couches, at homeless shelters and in alleyways. He knew he could go back to the Academy, but he would rather die of hypothermia or starve to death, actually. 

He figured out he could make money with his powers. It took him longer than it should have, and maybe it was not even really his own achievement.  
Some random chick, Kitty, or Kathy or something, who chatted him up at a bar told him about her flat being haunted by her dead aunt (ah, the things drunk people love to tell strangers). Klaus offered to help. If the ghost was willing, he could conjure them, as long as he was sober enough to, let’s say, walk in a straight line. The aunt just wanted the girl to stop putting tea cups on her expensive, old furniture without a coaster.

Two weeks later he got a call from Kitty-or-Kathy (he didn’t remember giving her his number), asking if he could help a friend of a friend.  
Said friend of a friend gave Klaus a hundred dollars to contact her dead father about a heritage thing.

That was when Klaus realized he could make some money with his cursed powers.  
He had already got the whole spooky thing going on, and maybe getting sober-ish once in a while, just long enough to help some unfortunate soul, wouldn’t hurt. Hey, daddy should be proud! He was helping people! If it was only so he could afford a few more gram and to rent a shithole of an apartment, that was no one’s business.  
(Ben was not a fan of Klaus‘ little business, even after Klaus laid out these brilliant arguments, but Klaus had long ago decided Ben didn’t get a say in what he did, even if they were stuck with each other)

Ever so often his father would rear his ugly head, and send him into rehab. Klaus wondered if it was some weak attempt to make up for all the damage he did, but it didn’t really matter, because he was always looking for the quickest way to get high the second he stepped out of the rehabilitation centre with a shiny new 30 day sobriety chip.

 

One time, high as a kyte, he asked Ben when they knew.  
It was a question he immediatly regreted asking, even in his state.

„We should have done something“, Ben said quietly, instead of answering.  
Klaus grinned „What do you mean? I’m fine, Benny“ 

 

The years passed in a haze and not much changed.  
The constants in his life were the drugs and Ben, despite all his snarky comments indicating that he hated being in Klaus‘ presence.  
Different boyfriends, different places he stays at, different night clubs, different clinics, a few months in prison, but it was all the same in the end. 

Allison made herself a star, Vanya wrote her ugly book, Luther, forever Daddy’s Number One, went to the moon. Diego did, whatever the hell it was he does and Number Five never returned. Klaus didn’t blame him. He hoped Number Five had simply found a better place to call home, even if they never got along well. He had no desire to see any of his siblings ever again. Especially not after that fucking book dear Vanya wrote.

 

It was his twelth time in rehab, ordered by court this time, stupid thing, really, when Dr. Reginald Hargreeves kicked the bucket. 

And then Number Five returned with news of the fucking Apocalypse. 

Hazel and Cha-Cha showed up and just when you think it can’t get worse, you are tortured for days, go through withdrawals, get a lady cop killed and end up in 1968. 

 

Klaus was half-convinced he was on a very bad acid trip. But it was real, very real, and it was war.

Klaus had thought he had seen enough shit to last a life-time – he had been in prison, for christ’s sake!  
But Vietnam was something else entirely.

Klaus could see the dead wherever he went, and he had still never seen so much pain, violence and destruction. Civilians, soldiers, children, mighty politians – war knew no differnce, war took anyone. Corpses pilling up to the sky, the dead still screaming in agony. 

Yeah, war sucked.

But in Vietnam, 1968, Klaus also met Dave. He would not have made it without Dave.

Klaus had never known real love. His father certainly didn’t love him. And if his siblings did, or had, their father screwed them up enough to never be able to show it. By the time Klaus had gotten in touch with real people he was already constantly high and unable to feel anything real. Their had been flings, maybe even relationships, but nothing serious, nothing like this.  
Dave was the first person to ever love him. 

And then Dave died. Took his last breath in Klaus‘ arms. 

And it felt like Klaus had died to. He was in the middle of a battlefield, bullets raining down all around them, but it felt like the world had already ended. 

„Klaus, get up!“ 

And there was Dave. No, not Dave. His ghost.  
He looked down at his own lifeless body in disbelief. Then his eyes zoned in back on Klaus.  
„You have to get out of here!“

To this day, Klaus was not sure how he managed to let go of Dave’s body. He focused on Dave’s voice, guiding him. Made it back to the suitcase somehow. 

„I love you“, Dave said. 

Then Klaus was back in 2019. 

The apocalypse was coming. He wasn’t sure if he cared all that much.

Sobriety.

He was legally dead for two minutes. (Luther was a fucking idiot.)

Dad.

Vanya.

The apocalypse.

The fucking moon exploded.

Time travel. 

Suddenly Klaus was fucking twelve again. He was not even Klaus yet, he was Number Four. It wouldn’t be another year, until after Five dissappeared and got lost in time, when Reginald would give Mom the ordert to name them.

There was two things he wants to do. Kill their bastard-father, and get high off his ass. 

Trouble was close to no one would sell drugs to a twelve year old. And he was pretty sure his usual cocktail would kill his twelve-year old body, anyway. The next best thing (a little fuck you to dear old dad as well, maybe) was stealing a bottle of very, very expensive scotch from his office and drinking it in his room. 

The siblings, back in their 12 year old bodies, had gotten closer, than they were before and neither father nor Pogo dared to mention it, even if they were definitely confused. They would all sneak into each others‘ rooms at night now, not just Allison and Luther. 

Unfortuntaly, Klaus‘ stupid kid body couldn’t even handle half a bottle of whiskey, before he was bowed over the toilet.  
His mind was foggy and he was about to pass out, still bent over the toilet, when he felt a warm hand on his back. 

„Maybe Vanya is not the only one we should have been nicer to“, Allison whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> i know there is no way in hellfuck klaus would be aware of allison's words or presence at that moment but who doesnt love some vague omnious pov changes


End file.
